ORONO, Maine — Three leaders in Maine’s Native American circles provided a status report Tuesday on the state of their relations with state government.
During a panel discussion at the University of Maine’s Memorial Union, Penobscot Donna Loring, president of Seven Eagles Media Productions and a tribal representative to the Maine Legislature from 1999 through 2008, likened the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes withdrawing their delegates to the Legislature in May of last year to “getting off a dead horse.”
The tribal representatives, she said, “walked away with no recognition or no trace that they’d ever been here and more importantly with no plans to ever return there to try to revive that dead horse.”
In reflecting on her years in the Legislature, Loring said there were victories — including a law requiring Maine schools to teach Wabanaki history — but that those were hard won.
Because tribal delegates have no vote, they essentially are powerless, Loring said. While Maine has allowed the Penobscot Nation to send a delegate to Augusta since 1823, not once was a chief allowed to address the Legislature until 2002, she said.
When tribes attempt to engage in economic development activities, such as operating a casino, the state typically rejects the notion, according to Loring. Maine’s Native Americans wanted to open a casino in Maine but the state issued the license to an out-of-state company and then allowed another to open a casino in Oxford County.
“We have effectively been kept in poverty,” she said.
With regard to sovereignty, Passamaquoddy Gail Dana-Sacco, a public health scholar and director emerita of the UMaine Wabanaki Center, said sovereignty amounts to “the right to have opportunity.”
“It has to do with how we honor each other as people and how we are all in this together. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we are in this together,” she said.
“… There aren’t enough of us tribal people to make it right,” she said, later adding, “This is not just about the tribes. This is about everybody and to be willing to say, ‘OK, I need to learn more about it and this is my piece of what I can do.”
Sherri Mitchell, a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, lawyer, activist and executive director of the Land Peace Foundation, provided an overview of United Nations’ policy on indigenous people as well as federal and state law pertaining to Native American people.
As she sees it, the state’s record of complying with the federal Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act is less than stellar. The tribes covered in the act maintain that land was the only thing they agreed to give up, not their fishing rights or water rights.
“They have decided that they are unilaterally going to change the terms of that agreement over and over and over again,” she said.
“This would be like, ‘I’m going to sell you my house in Hampden, Maine, and then you coming back 25 years later and saying, ‘OK, well I also want your camp in Eustis because you already sold me your house in Hampden, right?” she said.
Concerns about the state and Gov. Paul LePage’s apparent lack of respect for tribal sovereignty prompted the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes to withdraw their delegates to Legislature.
When the Penobscots and Passamaquoddys ended their relationship with the state, conflicts had been worsening for several years over tribal fishing rights, judicial jurisdiction and environmental standards.
Tensions spiked last April when LePage rescinded a 4-year-old executive order that said the tribes would be consulted on state decisions that affect native people.
In rescinding the order, LePage stated that all tribal people, lands, resources and government structures fall under the jurisdiction of the Maine state government, which the tribes said was an affront to their sovereignty.